This is a blog by Mark Verzijl, Consultant at Sciential.
"𝘋𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘯 𝘢𝘣𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘦 𝘯𝘰-𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘳, 𝘩𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳, 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘣2𝘣 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘣𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘦". This is a line that I have heard quite often. Life science marketers, business developers and c-suite executives often think that within life sciences there is a limited menu to choose from. Some Google ads, maybe a LinkedIn campaign here and there, but you typically reach this audience on on events and conferences- they say.
I promise you all, that is not true. Besides all the smart tactics you can use to target your audience with a laser focus through digital channels, you can also ‘just’ leverage data. Obviously with your first & second party data (your web visitors, CRM data – I hope you already use that) but especially third party data. When your company strives to address a new group of prospects or tap into a new audience, third party data can definitely help you.
Also within life sciences, there are a lot of third party data vendors. Companies that make audiences segments available for you to use on your platforms of choice. This way you can perfectly sniper-target founders of biotech-startups or R&D directors of drug developing companies on basically each channel you want. Because that is usually the challenge; most channels are called ‘b2c’ platforms because the pre-defined audiences are not b2b (and especially not life sciences) related. However, when you have access to the right data, these audiences become targetable all of the sudden. Then, it appears that there is no such thing as a b2c or b2b platform – when you are able to target the right audience with an appealing message, every channel becomes relevant. Then it is basically business-to-human rather than business-to-consumer or business.
In short, make sure to get access to the right data sets to increase your toolkit in terms of digital marketing so you are not completely reliant of the beaten paths and doing exactly the same things as your competitors.
